Agrigento, Sicilia. Thursday May 3

Agrigento, Sicilia. Thursday May 3

Hand Holding Holy Water

Dear Trail Friends,

This was a lovely day for me. I was able to sleep late (about 8:15am) after going to sleep just past midnight after finishing the blog. It was the first night I’ve gotten 8 hours of sleep since leaving home. 

It was a free day - the bus driver’s day off (he’s entitled to one day off each week, union regulations, I think). For me it was great. We could go to the museum and wander around the town when and where we pleased, and at our own pace. Some tour group members were way more ambitious than I was, renting a car to drive down toward the shore, and walk through the woods to the ocean. Much as I would love time in the woods I was so so happy to be doing less and having less input. Indescribably happy. 

Chris and I, and Hanna and Judy (our sisters) walked the half mile or so to the museum. On the way I saw an electrical box with a bunch of wires sticking out; it caught my eye, and I went back to photograph it. Somehow it seemed to express something for me - being at loose ends, or seeking connections (inner connections, I think, which I seem to lose when I find the outer world demands on my attention too great - and when I am unable to make any true outer connections, either, since I’m disconnected from me). So here is Photo 1 and I think I will call it Lost Connections. 

Just before the museum there was a small Norman church that our guide Angela had encouraged us to visit. I was struck by a holy water bowl inside a sculpted hand. It reminded me of a beautiful small porcelain bowl held in two hands that my brother Scott made for Chris and me for our first wedding in 1994. It also reminded me of a drawing of hands that my sister Judy made to honor her daughter Angel (who died last August) this past holiday season. I have a feeling I may have posted Judy’s drawing before but most of you know I have memory challenges, so - even if I am posting it a second time, it feels like it belongs here. Just as the wires express lost connections, hands for me express connection at the most basic level of touch and holding. So photo 2 is a collage of the holy water bowl and the front and back of Judy’s card. I wish I had a photo of Scott’s wedding bowl to include - you will have to imagine that one. 

I realize as I look at this collage how much Angel’s death is a lost connection for me. I lost my connection to her, my hope that I might be of some help or support to her in the future, that there would be a future for her that would go on after I was gone and that the love I had been able to give her, however imperfect, would live on in her after I was gone. The hand holding the holy water bowl, like the hands of light holding Angel, comfort me. They remind me of the power of prayer - of hope, of creativity - to create connection with the unknown, the dream, the holy. 

Once in the museum I soon lost sight of the others, and wandered into rooms that seemed darker and less visited.  I could feel my body begin to un-tense and my breathing relax and deepen. I was so happy to be wandering through the museum alone and able to notice what called to me in the exhibits, free to notice and respond to my own experience. I find myself relaxing and breathing more deeply as I write this. I wish I could be really relaxed and open - and present to myself - in the presence of other people. But that is difficult for me. It’s the reason I love to hike solo - even in a museum. But I cherish this blog because it is a chance to practice being present to myself and others at the same time. Yes, you are far away. And there is a time lag between when you read this and when I write it. And yet in some mysterious sense you are also with me as I walk through the museum alone and as I sit alone writing this. 

I loved looking at the vases and remembering Chris talking on the bus about how vases tell a story and sometimes offer alternative versions of a myth. She spoke about a vase painting where Hades and Persephone skip off together through the flowers, holding hands, and another where Demeter and Hades sit down together to share a meal. These are very different from the story of the violent abduction of Persephone by Hades, and of Demeter’s inconsolable loss. There are so many ways to tell a story. 

As we walk through the museum, it’s fun to look at vases and think about the story they tell - even if we don’t know what myth they are depicting. Photo 3 is a collage of vases that caught my eye. The upper photo is the chariot of the sun - and I think I love it because I love both wings and horses. One of my favorite childhood daydreams involved riding away on my winged horse. I have always found horse’s bodies beautiful and their motion and energy sensual and erotic. And wings are as wild and exciting as the wind and the waves. I like thinking of the sun’s motion - and so the passage of time and days - as pulled by winged horses, by that kind of powerfully rearing and plunging and pulsating energy. 

I don’t know what myth the vase on the lower left depicts. What strikes me in it is the beauty of the man and woman - both seem so very young and delicate. I have the feeling that this is about to be their first sexual encounter, perhaps the night after their wedding, a beginning. I love that he holds a cat and she holds a bird, which creatures suggest to me a metaphor of predator and prey (for man and woman).  But something about the cat’s eyes make me feel that the cat is the one who is afraid of the bird - not so clear who is predator, who prey - and I love that ambiguity. Speaking of ambiguity, the middle vase, which I believe is a painting of Dionysius, is wonderfully gender ambiguous. He has the head of a swarthy bearded masculine sort of man, but his legs and skirt and feet seem light and girlish. And the right vase has two birds facing each other, only one bird has the head of a bird and the other has the head of a human being. I like that. I always like creatures who are part one thing and part something else. 

There is so much more I want to tell you about - but it is past midnight and I need to go to sleep. I love sharing this trip with you. I love that you actually read it, enjoy the adventure, respond. You have no idea how happy I feel to have this kind of contact - and at enough distance that I can also be alone. Writing this blog and sensing your presence gives me the feeling of the hand holding the holy water or Judy’s hands of light. Whereas so often in the presence of other people I feel like that box with all its broken wires sticking out. 

After the museum Chris and Hanna and I walked up higher on the hill into downtown Agrigento, hoping to eat at a restaurant with outdoor tables and a view of the ocean, and according to friends who ate there yesterday, spectacular food. Unfortunately we found today it was closed, probably because of intermittent rain. But we had a good lunch at another restaurant nearby. I loved my lunch of assorted Sicilian antipasto, and afterwards my first gelato in a cone since getting here (I am giving up sugar sobriety while here, as well as on the actual trail). 

When we got back after a little rest Judy and I got together to do our drawing. I wish I’d taken a photo of Judy’s drawing inspired by designs on a vase.  Mine was inspired by a combination of images: a lion biting into the neck of a donkey (from the museum today), a mother holding and nursing twin infants (from the museum in Siracusa I believe) and a modern bronze of a large head (located outside the museum today). Photo 4 collages those three images and my drawing. I don’t so much love the outcome of the drawing, as I loved the experience drawing it and contemplating the images and what they mean to me. There was for me a powerful connection between the lion’s paw on the donkey she was biting into, and the mother’s hands on the infant,  and the infant’s hand on her breast.  Both violence and nurturance involve touch and connection. I am not sure what I think or how I feel about that. Somehow the sorrow on the face of the bronze sculpture (titled by the way Ophelia Grande by artist Gunther Stilling) seemed to hold the contradictions, the tenderness and the cruelty of human life, the wanting to protect and be protected and the impossibility of that happening (I guess I am thinking of Angel as I write that, especially, and also of my childhood anger at my mother for failing to protect me). 

Chris lectured tonight about the site we will visit tomorrow, Selinunde, and she focused on myths about Zeus, the king of the gods of Mount Olympus, and Hera his wife, in part because there were probably temples to both of them there (though precisely which temples honored precisely which gods or goddesses seems to be subject to scholarly dispute). Of course Chris’s lecture about Zeus and Hera and their marriage touched on Zeus’s frequent infidelities- his rapes and seductions of beautiful young mortal women - and she startled me by reading from my long poem about Arachne in which I amplify Ovid’s description of a weaving contest between Athena and Arachne in which Arachne’s tapestry depicts rapes and seductions, crimes of the gods perpetrated on mortals, while Athena’s celebrates the glory of the gods. My poem was one long meditation on rape as an archetypal human experience. (If you can’t bear not to read it you can find it in my poetry book Magic Carpet at Amazon - just search for River Malcolm Magic Carpet)

I felt very exposed when Chris read from it (she had not forewarned me that she planned to do so) and very aware of the ambivalence I feel both wanting my innermost self (and the poetry that expresses that self) to be seen, and wanting to be alone and invisible. All this seems related to the theme developing here - whether or not I am able to put it in words. 

Chris also spoke about how Hera would visit a spring that restored her virginity. Chris described virginity in a way I found moving - not an intact hymen but an experience of wholeness, of being one in oneself. It made me think of my experiences on the trail, of the person I become when I am alone walking through beauty, that deep relaxing, that opening up to fill my body with breath, my eyes with the surrounding colors and shapes, my ears with the sounds, my nose with the smells, my heart with the love and wonder of being alive. 

It’s almost 1am. Time to stop. Thank you. I wouldn’t write this if you weren’t there to listen and receive it. And even though it’s hard work for me to write it, I can’t begin to describe what a gift you are giving to me. It - the blog - the mysterious way in which you and I touch and connect via language and imagination - made the solitude of the trail possible for me because I was not completely alone, you were also there. And this blog also makes the complexity of the human interactions here possible for me, because I can withdraw into this privacy - oddly made possible by your distant presence (holding me like the hand below the holy water bowl) - the spring in which I recover (each night) my virginity. 

Thank you for walking, riding, flying with me. 

See you tomorrow in Selinunde.